An Evolutionary Reengagement With Todorov’s Decameron

Abstract

The disquisition that follows reevaluates the “Structural Analysis of Narrative” (1969) performed on the Decameron (c. 1349–53) of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) by Tzvetan Todorov (1939- ).1 In applying Darwinian advances to the structuralist method, this reengagement not only frees the Decameron from the critical dominance of historicism and feminism, but more especially promotes the continued validity of structuralism as a literary theory. Although nar- ratology, as posited by Gérard Genette (1930- ), has become the preeminent structuralist methodology, and while Todorov’s personal history under Stalinism eventually impelled him to undertake historical, ideological, and intensely political studies that reached their apogee with Hope and Memory (2003), his analysis of the Decameron demands reappraisal for two important reasons. First, his desire to establish “a kind of propaedeutic for a future science of literature” (2100) appeals to the emerging field of interdisciplinary studies. Second, his own application of this preparatory lesson is hardly propitious, returning a particularly reductive rendition of Boccaccio’s masterpiece. The following prolegomenon addresses each of these issues by employing the methodological developments in narrative modeling that Todorov anticipated but did not use in his “Structural Analysis of Narrative.”